


009 "cancel"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [9]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, My Pepper is different, Pre-Iron Man, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 20:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony toys with his new assistant by telling her he wants to cancel a meeting she's worked hard to plan so he can go surfing. In reality he's bored and he's hoping she'll amuse him with her nervous breakdown. However, it's Tony who suffers when he realizes Pepper might actually cancel the meeting, which is the last thing he wants—and he can't get a straight answer from her about it. "I can totally respect it if you were just messing with me. I deserved it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	009 "cancel"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. At some point I'll post a timeline.
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.

            "Have you seen my new assistant?" I asked idly. Obadiah and I were hanging out in my office, dissecting a new gadget he'd brought back from a trade show in Japan. This was more work-like than, say, looking at porn online, but still not exactly the best use of our time, corporately-speaking.

            "The blond? With the heels?" he asked, painstakingly removing a spring with a pair of forceps.

            "Yeah. Isn't she hot?" I knocked a couple bits of plastic out of the casing and he frowned at me.

            "Do you remember where those were?" he asked with disapproval at my haste.

            "Of course," I assured him. What did he think I was— _not_ a mechanical genius?

            "She's awfully young," Obadiah commented after a moment, looking into the casing with a magnifying glass.

            "Who? Oh, yeah, Pepper. I guess. Let me see that."

            He snorted at me. "Pepper, huh? Well I expect you haven't gotten around to looking at her face yet."

            "It's better than Gill Face's, that's for sure," I opined, poking at the machine's innards.

            "You know, it's not always a good thing to have a hot assistant," he warned me. "She's not going to get much done if you're always boinking her in the supply closet."

            My hand slipped and prodded too forcefully at the mechanism, which popped and sparked then gave up the ghost. I tossed the tool away in exasperation. "Look what you made me do!"

            "Me?" Obadiah laughed, sitting back.

            "How am I supposed to concentrate with that imagery, huh?" He merely chuckled and conceded the point. For a moment I was worried I was going to be bored now, then a brilliant idea struck me. "Well, since this thing is broken, let's get Pepper in here and play with her."

            Obadiah's eyebrows shot up. "Okay," he agreed gamely. "What did you have in mind?"

            "She's been working for two weeks to set up this production design meeting for this afternoon on the new X-12 rockets," I told him, grinning. "Lots of emails and phone calls, getting the designers in three different countries conferenced in, the works. Su Chung in Design was telling me about it."

            "And?" Obadiah prompted, no doubt guessing where this was headed.

            "And," I revealed smugly, "I'm gonna tell her I'm taking the rest of the day off."

            Obadiah laughed disbelievingly. "You really are a little p---k, aren't you?"

            "It'll be fun," I agreed. "You wanna place a bet on screaming, crying, swearing like a sailor?"

            "I think she looks like she's got a black belt in something," Obadiah observed, "so I'm gonna go with snapping your neck."

            "Neck snapping it is." I schooled my features into a semblance of professionalism and pressed the intercom button. "Oh, Pepper?"

            " _Yes, Mr. Stark?_ "

            "Could you come in here a minute, please?"

            " _Yes, sir._ "

            "'Please,'" Obadiah mocked. "You're so polite, aren't you?"

            Pepper opened the door to my office and walked in, heels muffled by the carpet. She stopped expectantly by my desk. "Pepper," I began casually, stretching in my chair, "I'm beat. I'm gonna take the rest of the day off, maybe go surfing."

            She frowned, just a little. "You _do_ have the production design meeting about the X-12 rocket scheduled for this afternoon, sir."

            "Oh, yeah," I said, as if just remembering. Then I waved it off. "Well, just reschedule that for me, okay?"

            "Alright, sir," she answered smoothly. "Would you like me to check on water conditions for you, sir?"

            Hmm, not quite what we were expecting. Maybe she was a repressor. "No thanks, Pepper. That's all." And she walked out.

            Obadiah and I looked at each other as soon as the door was shut. "That was—odd," I finally commented, bemused.

            "You know, I _have_ heard she's a little weird," Obadiah mentioned.

            "No, no, no," I insisted. "It's gonna happen. She just didn't want to flip out in front of the boss." I quickly sent an email to one of the secretaries who sat outside my office and prompted her to read it with a text message. Her response disappointed me. "She says Pepper's just sitting out there working. No swearing, ranting, crying…"

            "This is very disappointing," Obadiah said, in a tone that somehow mocked me.

            I frowned at the email, reading it again. Then I sent a follow-up just to be sure. "Mary's supposed to let me know if Pepper does anything interesting," I reported.

            Obadiah regarded me with affectionate amusement. "Why don't you just install a hidden camera out there?" he suggested sardonically. "It would be more efficient than making one assistant spy on another."

            A light bulb went off. "Aha! Great idea!" I commenced tapping at my keyboard. "The security cameras!"

            Obadiah rolled his eyes but nonetheless scooted over to look at the black-and-white image that popped up on my screen. It was a wide shot, designed to encompass the desks of all four women who were stationed like guards outside my office door. Pepper, as my personal assistant, basically did whatever I told her to, but primarily scheduling, direct correspondence, and logistics. The other three—grandmotherly women who surrounded themselves with photos of their dogs, angel figurines, and dishes of Tootsie Rolls—tended to the lesser duties of filing, Xeroxing, taking messages, signing for packages, ordering tape flags, and so forth. They were carefully screened to ensure I would never hit on them (nor they on me), so they would actually stick around long enough to learn their jobs. Right now Sheryl and Lois were sipping coffee and trading photos, while Mary poked at papers on her desk and presumably kept an eye on Pepper. Pepper merely typed, with no emotion visible to the somewhat distant camera.

            "Remember Maria, who used to curse at me in Portuguese?" I reminisced fondly. "And Starlene, who would tell the others how she wanted to gouge my eyeballs out with her long, scary fingernails?"

            Obadiah gave me a look. "Do you _want_ your assistants to hate you?"

            "No, it just seems inevitable," I replied, trying to zoom in on Pepper's face. "So I try to make the best of it."

            "This last one wasn't so bad," he opined, leaning back in his chair again. "She lasted for what, a couple years?"

            I had to give the Big Gill some credit. She worked hard, kept things more or less organized, and only growled at me a handful of times a month. "So, not bad for an old lady," I concluded.

            Obadiah laughed. "An 'old lady'? She was probably _my_ age."

            "Well yeah," I replied flippantly. "But she had zero sense of humor and looked at me like I was something sticky on the bottom of her shoe. Kind of like many of the nannies I had. And Pepper's way hotter anyway."

            "Where'd she go to school?" Obadiah inquired casually, now that we were officially wasting time.

            "Ol' Blue Gill?"

            "Pepper."

            "Oh, I don't know," I shrugged, still scrutinizing the monitor. "I think we need to increase the resolution of our security cameras."

            "They're for catching armed kidnappers and corporate spies," Obadiah pointed out, "not the subtle, silent misery of your assistants."

            "Oh, look, she's—Oh, never mind, she's just eating," I amended. "Mary says she eats a _ton_ and has already emptied all the candy dishes once this week. Maybe she'll balloon up from the stress of this job."

            "Where'd she work before?" Obadiah persisted.

            "Oh, I don't know," I told him dismissively. "She goes through a six-pack of Coke a day, too. Her insides must be rotting away!"

            "Did you even look at her résumé before hiring her?"

            I snorted. "Who has time for that?"

            He rolled his eyes. "Yes, your days are so packed with meaningful pursuits. Like tormenting your assistant."

            "I'm sure Gill Face checked her out," I told him. "And HR, too. I'm sure she's not a felon or anything."

            "But what," Obadiah teased, "what if her last job was working for an even bigger a-s than you, so nothing you do fazes her?"

            "Who could be a bigger a-s than me?" I demanded smugly. "I mean, I'm irresponsible, self-centered, obnoxious, demanding, smug, and come very close to sexually harassing."

            "But at least you're a good person at heart," Obadiah cracked.

            "That's true, I am," I mused. "I mean, I could be a _real_ b-----d and needlessly toy with my employees' emotions."

            Obadiah laughed tolerantly at that. "Well you have a point there."

            I drummed my fingers impatiently on the desk. "She's still typing!" I complained. "I wonder what she's writing. Maybe she's ranting about me to a friend. Maybe I could exercise my right to read her corporate email…"

            "Maybe," Obadiah suggested slowly, with a dangerous twinkle in his eye, "maybe she's cancelling that meeting like you told her to."

            My eyes widened—I hadn't considered _that_ possibility. "Oh, s—t!" Obadiah started laughing as I scrambled for the intercom button and summoned Pepper again. If she told even _one_ of those persnickety designers it was off it would be months before I could round them all up again.

            Pepper walked back into my office, coolly professional. She even ignored Obadiah, barely suppressing his laughter off to the side. "Yes, sir?"

            "Pepper, um, you didn't—you know that meeting this afternoon?" I blurted.

            "The production design meeting about the X-12 rocket, sir?" she asked, with no hint of emotion.

            "Yes, that's the one. You didn't—"

            "You mean the one you told me to reschedule, sir?" Her tone was endlessly polite. No needling at all.

            "Yeah, yeah, that one," I assured her. "You didn't, you know, reschedule it yet, did you?"

            She frowned slightly. "Isn't that what you asked me to do, sir?"

            "Well, um, I _did_ , but I changed my mind," I said quickly. "It's still okay for today, right?"

            "I thought you wanted to go surfing, sir," Pepper remarked quizzically.

            Obadiah was barely containing his amusement at my discomfort. "No, no, Pepper, what I really want, now, is to go to that meeting," I insisted. "It's still on, right? You didn't cancel it or anything?"

            Pepper continued to frown, glancing at her notepad while my heart raced. I was already adding up the money it would cost to redo designs that hadn't been coordinated—I was good with numbers so it didn't take too long to see the damage. "I'm sorry, sir, I'm a little confused," Pepper confessed. "Now you _want_ to go to the production design meeting for the—"

            "The X-12 rocket," I agreed quickly. "Yes, Pepper, I absolutely do. I _want to go to the meeting_."

            "But you want to go to it on a different day?"

            "No, no! No no no no no. I want to go to it _today_ , as scheduled." I couldn't honestly get mad at her, since this was entirely my doing, so I resolved to get mad at Obadiah for giving up any pretense of restraint and laughing freely at my predicament. "I can still do that, can't I? Pepper?" If that last bit came out slightly pleading, well, I wasn't ashamed to admit it. If I was going to be hearing about this for a long time to come—and I was—I at least didn't want the punch line to be that I'd lost a couple hundred grand to boot. "Did you—did you cancel it already?"

            "No, sir, I hadn't gotten around to it yet," she finally revealed, and I sagged with relief.

            "Thank G-d," I breathed, exhausted from the tension. A thought occurred to me as Obadiah cackled in the background. "Pepper, were you messing with me just now?" I asked suspiciously.

            "Sir?"

            "I can totally respect it if you were just messing with me," I assured her. "I deserved it. You can admit it. Go on."

            She seemed genuinely confused, d—n her. "Sir? You look a bit flushed, sir. Can I get you some water?"

            I decided maybe she _hadn't_ been messing with me, which was somehow worse. "No, no thank you, Pepper," I told her. "The meeting's still on at 2pm, right? Today?"

            "Yes, sir. Was there anything else, sir?"

            "No, thank you, Pepper, that's all." As soon as she was gone I turned on Obadiah. "Well thanks so much for your support, I really appreciated it," I told him sourly.

            "I like her," he responded, still chuckling a little. "She's fun."

            "A little slow on the uptake," I grumbled. Still, now that the event was over, the memory was beginning to fade and so were any lingering negative emotions. It was kind of a blessing/curse thing for me, really. "She handled that little test well, don't you think? No crying, no screaming…"

            "Oh, so now you _wanted_ her to stay calm?" Obadiah scoffed.

            "Well, it's good to _know_ ," I told him reasonably. "We test, we observe, we learn the limits…"

            "We push _past_ the limits and have to hire a new assistant," he finished dryly.

            I decided not to dignify that remark with an answer and instead pulled out my phone. "I'm gonna call Rhodey and tell him about this. He'll laugh his a-s off."

            Obadiah rolled his eyes and stood. "Well, I'll just go back to work then," he said with a hint of sarcasm. "Don't worry, I'll show myself out."

            "Okay, thanks," I called over my shoulder, propping my feet up on my desk. "Hey, Rhodey, it's me. Did I tell you about my new assistant? Her name is Pepper and she's really hot…"

* * *


End file.
